Rumours

Just read here that Nintendo are to reveal a pre-tax loss of ¥100 billion (£821 million), which is a lot of money even for Nintendo. With the recent flop of 3DS and developers turning away from Nintendo DS / Wii because of high production costs, bad sales and the terrible WiiWare and DSiWare platforms, is there much future left for Nintendo? Nintendo are also suffering at the hands of smart phones and tablets such the iPhone, iPad and Android, with the insanity driven sea of free and $0.99 games and apps (termed frapp-mentality) taking over, people do not want to pay $20-$40 for a hand held game these days,

How can Nintendo survive? Well they can go the way of console hardware manufacturers of the past such as Sega and sell / rework old intellectual properties / develop games across platforms. They could even embrace the Android platform and create their own handheld based / phone / tablet on the technology, offering their own premium Nintendo apps channel.

Who knows, is this the beginning of the end of the much loved Nintendo as a console developer / manufacturer or do Nintendo have something up their sleeves that will blow us away like the Nintendo Wii originally did? Maybe some crazy cool virtual reality console that you control with your mind!? I guess we will have to just wait and see.

I recently came across this great article on techcrunch and thought it a worth while mention to you budding game and app developers.

According to this article Android now has 41.8% of the US market (up a staggering 5.8% on last quarter), whilst Apple’s iOS has a very respectable 27% (up 1% on last quarter). RIM also has a very respectable 21.7% (4% drop) and Microsoft a 5.7% share (1% drop).

From these figures it looks like Android is stealing the share from RIM and Microsoft and probably a few other lesser known platforms that share the bottom 2% of the market. I’m quite surprised to see Microsoft losing ground already considering that their offering hasn’t not long since left the gates. Maybe the new Mango update and Nokia alliance will help fix that.

With the imminent launch of Amazon’s tablet the Kindle Fire, does Apple have a fight on their hands I wonder. I think its a distinct possibility as its priced at less than half the price ($199) and Amazon have a large existing user base. Will we see Apple lose shares to Android when the Kindle Fire hits mid November 2011.

Because I’m thoroughly enjoying blogging I am expanding my blog to other areas. As you may or may not have noticed, I have started adding new pages to the blog. The new pages include:

Jobs & Projects - Here I will post jobs or projects that you would like to fill or put out for tender. Please note that I will only post jobs related to the subjects specified as my readers probably aren’t interested in the latest cleaning or accountancy vacancies